Extract from Libro Verde de Medio Ambiente, Tomo I/The Green Book of the Environment, Volume 1

Red de Redes de Desarollo Local Sostenible (2007)

This is an extract from the manual of sustainable urban planning and design published in association with the Ministry for the Environment. It describes the apparent disconnect between the social, political and economic forces affecting city management and urban design in the 21st century, and the capacity of planners and other urban actors to respond effectively with appropriate strategies and techniques to maximise the sustainability and liveability of cities. This is a topic which I have a great interest in, and so I really enjoyed working on this piece.

As we can see, the underlying causes of these trends are not restricted to the narrow confines of city planning, with its regulatory framework and associated tools. Rather, they are the result of economic trends operating at both local and global levels, mobility patterns, the emergence of new kinds of individual and social relationships and with the entire gamut of national, regional and local policies which shape, impose or exclude certain options within urban space. These patterns can be summarised as follows:

• The primary factor is the unprecedented intensity and duration of the current property boom [3], which has served to both drive up prices and to bring about an increase in the total urbanised area, with the associated territorial, social and environmental consequences and ramifications. Working in parallel with this primary factor are other more tangential causes which feed into it and lead us in environmentally undesirable directions.

• An institutional framework geared towards increasing the profitability of property transactions through capital appreciation rather than rental income, boosting the demand for homes as a more or less hidden form of investment.

• An institutional and economic framework which supports the continued spread of scattered, functionalist urban development, encouraging 1) the expansion of low-density development and 2) development in which the various elements and functions of the urban realm are disconnected and can only be linked through motorised transport.

• The context described above neglects the conservation and improvement of the city as a collective civic and heritage-preservation project. The need for restoration and rehabilitation of our built heritage both in terms of buildings and the public realm has been largely ignored, allowing the inefficient use, neglect and destruction of this heritage to become standard practice, alongside new development which has reached a frenetic pace.

• The rapid pace of new development is throughout the country creating an urban realm which is both oversized and poorly designed and constructed. The principal challenge for the future in terms of sustainability and liveability [2] no longer lies in improving the quality of new construction and urban design but, above all, in managing the existing city and built heritage through regeneration and rehabilitation to enable it to meet contemporary needs.

It is envisaged that these objectives, rooted in the interests and consensus of all urban actors, would work to counteract the most damaging trends in urban development. As a general goal, new urban development and the regeneration of the existing urban fabric should address the two most significant challenges identified earlier – sustainability and the advent of the age of knowledge and information – while also serving to exemplify and lend substance to the paradigm of the Mediterranean city as a model of compact and complex, efficient and socially stable urban form. Furthermore, both of these processes, new development and the renewal of the existing urban fabric, should be rooted in an understanding of New Urbanism [3], described in section five of this text ,and should address the new concept of liveability (see section 4.3 of the chapter on construction) as well as the proposal for a new model of transportation, featured in point 5.9 on the chapter on mobility.

• The first objective is specifically concerned with redirecting current trends away from new construction on a massive scale and towards the management and regeneration of the existing city and built heritage, in ways that minimise the economic, social and environmental impacts as far as possible.

• In economic terms, this means ensuring that the current property boom comes to the smoothest possible “touchdown”, something that will require the return to a capitalisation model based on both rental income and capital gains from sales, with the support of an institutional framework which accommodates this and which reaches beyond the limits of urban planning to address issues such as taxation and legal certainty. There is therefore a need to boost the profitability of the buy-to-let market by encouraging increases in rents, in order to avoid the situation whereby, when the property bubble eventually bursts, landlords move to liquidize their assets resulting in a glut of properties coming onto the market and a consequent collapse in prices.

• This last objective should be complemented by efforts to strengthen the social housing sector, not through new development but by adapting the country’s huge stock of unoccupied and second homes for this purpose. One pertinent case study is the model developed by the Basque Government, based on renting unoccupied or underutilized housing at market rates and subletting them at subsidised prices to those in need of affordable housing. This social housing policy has proved to be faster and less costly in both financial and ecological terms than buying land and building new homes.

• These objectives should be understood as supporting the conservation, improvement and efficient use of existing built heritage and of land already classified as urban, avoiding, as has been happening up until now, an explosion in land reclassifications and new developments accompanied by a deterioration of existing urban assets. One useful tool in the pursuit of this objective might be the establishment of a regulatory framework which prohibits both reclassifications and new construction as long as brownfield alternatives are available. A more efficient use of the built heritage could also be promoted by levying a tax on unoccupied properties and applying tax deductions to rented accommodation.

• With these points in mind, it would be worthwhile to specifically include the objective of promoting the reuse and regeneration of the existing build heritage instead of resorting to new development; an objective which would help to support those others detailed above.

• The objectives for urban planning can be distilled into a single mandate: to create cities, not urbanisation; to achieve a critical mass of people and activities in each urban area which allows the provision of public transport, services and basic facilities as well as the commercial infrastructure crucial to the development of day-to-day living patterns based on proximity.

• To reclaim the city as a project, New Urbanism must be supported in three key ways. Firstly, there must be a specific administrative body with political responsibility for the endeavour, capable of establishing the necessary regulatory framework. Secondly, it is essential that an intelligence system be established which allows the condition and use of urban land and the built environment, as well as the functions of the city, the system of rights controlling access to and/or influence over it, and the problems of its inhabitants to be monitored and evaluated in an integrated manner. Thirdly, there must be some mechanism for citizen participation which is capable of interacting with both the aforementioned administrative authority and this new intelligence system.

• In this context we might look at specific objectives for planning such as those outlined below, which address either the form of the city, the quality and diversity of the urban fabric, or the alleviation of the most detrimental environmental impacts.

• Creating mixed communities where people of different cultures and income levels live together. Social diversity is the key to avoiding a slide towards the development of ghettos in which homogeneous groups of residents cluster together.

• Reducing the impact of urbanisation on areas subject to development, by making new construction conditional on factors such as the adoption of low-impact development, the use of bioclimatic design, and implementation of techniques to reduce the consumption of water, energy and material resources.

• Increasing the complexity of the existing city by creating new urban centres, and of newly developed areas by establishing a mixture of uses and by promoting accessibility through proximity; combining polycentric structures with urban cores which are designed to help create a city in which travel distances are short and easily achievable by public transport.

• Increasing the quality of the urban realm through good urban design, particularly in terms of public spaces and facilities, in order to strike a new balance between busy and quiet zones and between urban compaction and the provision of breathing spaces within the city.

• Establishing a Green network using urban corridors to link up green spaces around the city with those within it, while also increasing the permeable land surface area and consequently the biotic index of the soil.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

[1]: Reference to the “current” property boom has been left intact, however the editor may wish to transpose this. The remarkable Spanish property boom/bubble came to an end with the 2008 financial crisis.

[2]: Note that “liveability” (“livability” in the US) is not a calque but a term that has become very common in city planning and in the urban studies literature.

[3]: What is referred to in English as “New Urbanism” or, sometimes rather obliquely as “the new conventional wisdom” is an approach to planning and urban policy which regards cities as opportunities and as potential “hubs” for economic growth, sustainability and cultural vibrancy.

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